Heresies Against the Imperium

by William Norman Grigg
Jun. 27, 2015

If Barack Obama is correct that white Americans are racist at a genetic level, shouldn’t this tendency be considered an inherent trait? Given the persistence of racism in the face of unremitting remedial action by government, should we regard it as an ineffaceable characteristic to be preserved and celebrated in the name of “diversity”?

Racism could be considered sinful. It is not innately criminal. Assuming that political government has a legitimate reason to exist, its jurisdiction applies only to “external behavior and not the inner life of man,” as Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote in a rare moment of moral lucidity.

All people are sinners, but relatively few are criminals. Aspiring totalitarians demand the power to define what is sinful, to refine sins as crimes, and then to redeem society through the application of violence. The roster of contemporary sins has been expanded to include possession or display of the Confederate Battle Flag, which the murderous sociopath Dylann Roof conspicuously displayed in a photograph taken shortly before embarking on his killing rampage in Charlotte.

Within days, the Battle Flag was removed from government-claimed property in several southern states. May the divine Lincoln forbid that property claimed by the plundering class be defaced by a symbol associated with aggressive contempt for the liberty and property of other human beings! It is entirely true that Confederate symbols should not be displayed on government property, but the appropriate remedy is not to ban the symbol, but rather to privatize the property.

Racial bigotry can inspire vicious criminal acts, and when wedded to state power it is a murderous, monstrous evil. That was true of both the long-dead political entity called the Confederacy and the still-operating Regime that conquered the independent South.

In the decade prior to the conflict conventionally called the Civil War, the federal government zealously protected the supposed property rights of slave “owners” throughout the union by way of the Fugitive Slave Act.

During that decade, southern slavery advocates were arch-unionists, and many abolitionists favored secession. The federal government was perfectly willing to use overwhelming force – including martial law – in order to capture escaped human beings and return them to captivity.

In early 1854, a young man named Anthony Burns escaped from the clutches of a Virginia man named Charles Settle, who claimed to “own” him. Burns found a home and gainful employment in Boston, but an informant recognized him as an escaped slave and contacted the authorities.

Deputy US Marshal James Batchelder, clothed in the majesty of the “law,” was deployed to Boston in pursuit of Burns. The marshal quickly located his victim and – after using the pretext of a bogus robbery investigation to place him under arrest -- locked him in the federal courthouse.

News of this abduction provoked an immediate response from local abolitionists, who organized an armed posse to liberate Burns from his captors. In the ensuing skirmish, Batchelder was fatally shot, but the police retained custody of Burns.

Desperate to avoid further bloodshed, Burns – a devout Christian – asked his supporters not to attempt another rescue. A few days later, he was led in shackles to a ship bound for Virginia. The rendition took place under the vigilant gaze of a 1,600-man military contingent sent by President Franklin Pierce to deter any further efforts to liberate Burns.

All of this was done by the supposed authority of the United States Federal Government, years before South Carolina and other states exercised their constitutional prerogative of withdrawing from the union to protest insufficient federal zeal in enforcing the Fugitive Slave Law.

In 1858, self-liberated slave John Prince, who was living near Oberlin College in Ohio, was lured into a similar trap devised by a slave-catcher bearing the improbable name Shakespeare Boynton. The objective was to convey Price back across the Ohio River to the slave state of Kentucky.

Students and faculty at Oberlin College organized an effort to free Prince, filing criminal complaints against his kidnapers and a habeas corpus petition with a local judge. Once peaceful and “legal” means had been exhausted, a group of thirty-seven activists formed a posse and liberated the captive by force.

During the trial of Simeon Bushnell, a timid bookstore clerk who drove the getaway wagon, the prosecutor piously accused Price’s benefactors of “outraging the law of the land,” which dictated that slaves were “not fit for freedom” and were the property of their owners whether found “north or south of the Ohio River.”

By this time, Price had been spirited away to freedom in Canada – because as a black human being he had no rights anywhere in the United States of America.

In his 1857 Dred Scott ruling, Chief Justice Roger Taney “decided that the power of Congress to make rules concerning the territory of the United States was subject to restrictions of the Constitution protecting property,” wrote historian Alice Nichols in her 1954 study Bleeding Kansas. “In a word, Taney ruled that slaves were property, not according to state law, but national…. Slavery had been given freedom of the public domain. Indeed, by inference, states themselves could no longer constitutionally exclude slavery. Since a man could safely take his slaves into states having anti-slavery legislation, it could be said there were no free states. Slaves were the same as any other kind of property, except that there were no laws requiring the return of strayed horses and cattle….[S]lavery had become a political football, kept inflated by Northern self-righteousness and kept in play by the South’s pigheaded championship of wrong.”

Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law led abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison – borrowing the words of Isaiah -- to describe the constitutional union as “a covenant with death and an agreement with hell.”

For his part, Lincoln – like the corporatist cabal he represented – was determined to make the union “perpetual,” even if that meant perpetuating chattel slavery. Lincoln’s reaction to South Carolina’s rebellion was not, “What will happen to my brethren in bondage?” but rather, “What will become of my tariff?”

Lincoln favored the proposed Corwin Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would have made slavery a permanent institution. As a war measure he “un-emancipated” slaves who had been freed in Kentucky by General John C. Fremont. For every day of his presidency Lincoln dutifully enforced the Fugitive Slave law, using federal troops to reward loyal slaveholders by returning their escaped “property.” All of this reflects the fact that he wasn't interested in abolishing slave labor as long as his government could collect taxes on it.

Whatever one thinks of the cause for which they fought, Confederate troops carried the Battle Flag as they confronted a hostile army, generally in engagements that took place at a strict reserve from civilians. This was decidedly not the case of the Stars and Stripes.

When Patrick Edward Connor and his troops massacred at least 300 innocent Bannock and Shoshone Indians – including scores of victims officially designated as “combatant children" -- at Bear River in January 1863, it wasn't a Confederate flag that caught the breeze above the slaughter.

When John Chivington's troops annihilated hundreds of peaceful Cheyennes at Sand Creek in November 1864, the Battle Flag was nowhere in evidence. The troops who cut down unarmed women, and then mutilated the victims by hacking off their breasts and pudenda as trophies, carried out their noble labor beneath the Stars and Stripes.

After the South had been conquered, and Generals Sherman and Sheridan pursued what the former called the "Final Solution" to the Indian problem, they didn’t act on behalf of the Confederacy, nor did their subordinates fly its Battle Flag. The December 1890 slaughter at Wounded Knee, the American foreshadowing of Babi Yar, was committed by the vengeful remnants of the U.S. Army's Seventh Cavalry, who wrought that Nazi-grade atrocity beneath the Stars and Stripes. The same banner was proudly displayed by the troops who slaughtered tens or hundreds of thousands of independence-minded Filipinos after their islands were "liberated" from Spain.

Theodore Roosevelt, the first self-described Progressive in the White House, was a passionate believer in the innate superiority of what he called the “higher races” – the Anglo-Americans, of course, supplemented by others, such as the Japanese, whom he described as “honorary Aryans.” Roosevelt, obviously, was a militant centralizer who evinced not a particle of Confederate sympathy.

The “consolidation of the states into one vast republic, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of that ruin which has overwhelmed all those that have preceded it,” General Lee lamented in his correspondence with Lord Acton. The British statesman – who was no advocate or defender of slavery – agreed with that assessment: “I mourn for the stake which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at Waterloo.”

As a matter of policy, Barack Obama, the incumbent figurehead of the imperial ruling elite, compiles a larger body count before breakfast every day than Dylann Roof did in Charleston.

Obama’s podcast interview with alleged comedian Marc Maron took place a few hours after Roof’s rampage – and two days after the weekly “Terror Tuesday” meeting in which he selects people for summary execution via drone strike. According to survivors of the Charleston atrocity, Roof very nearly shirked his self-assigned task of murdering innocent people at intimate range. A serial murderer who kills by remote control, Obama suffers from no similar scruples.

The discretionary power to expropriate or kill other human beings defines the office commonly called “Commander-in-Chief.” Dylann Roof was able to exercise similar power in the service of his evil ideas because the government ruling South Carolina, as part of its franchise within the U.S. government’s territorial monopoly on power, forbids worshipers to arm themselves to in self-defense. So naturally the prescription being urged upon us is for more aggressive measures to disarm the public while purging the country of the symbolic remnants of a short-lived attempt to break up Leviathan’s territorial monopoly, and any "retrograde" notions of asserting a right not to be ruled by Washington.

Prior to 1861, the united States were a decentralized confederation. As a result of the war, they were consolidated into a unitary government. After the Spanish-American War, this entity took on the characteristics of an empire -- or, to use the appropriate German term, a "reich." The Confederacy, for all of its manifold sins, never achieved that status.

The Confederate Battle Flag is reviled not because it is indelibly associated with racial bigotry and mass bloodshed, but because it symbolizes a refusal to be part of the sacred American reich.
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William Norman Grigg [send him mail] publishes the Pro Libertate blog and hosts the Pro Libertate radio program.